Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 85

spirit and in soul and in body and make you one with Him, now and ever after, Amen.”

The small gathering of people who had stood and witnessed the event sung a short hymn thanking God for all his mercies to us and when they had finished they all shook us warmly by the hand and welcomed us into the church of Christ. I felt incredibly uplifted, as if a heavy weight had just been taken from my back and I was curiously elated to be with all these strangers, though they were strangers to me no more. I was one of them. I had joined the church of Christ. I was now a Christian, something which was to change me so completely it’s hard when I look back over my life to remember a time of not being part of this marvellous community of souls. I said a little prayer to myself, thanking God for choosing me to join his flock, for forgiving all my past wrongs and for bringing me into his new light.

The afternoon of my baptism I went back to the ship with Polios and found the crew cleaning out the empty hold. The cargo had finally been unloaded and the hull was clearly riding higher in the water than before.

“We’re waiting for a cargo of wheat for Diocletian’s armies,” he informed me. “We’ve got a contract to transport it to Brundisium at the heel of Italy. The armies of the Rhine are short of bread and they’ll mutiny if they don’t get their daily rations. You have

DAVID PRICE WILLIAMS